Thousands more Hillary Clinton emails to be released

The State Department is set Wednesday to release the latest batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server as she tries to quiet a controversy over her handling of classified information during her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.While the former secretary of state, senator, and first lady has long maintained she and her husband were the targets of a vast right-wing conspiracy intent on politically ruining them, her use of a personal e-mail account to conduct government business handed her critics a potent new weapon to inflict unrelenting torment. potential conflicts of interest that arose from Clinton’s role as a public official and her husband’s leadership of the global foundation currying favor—and money—from some of the same foreign leaders with whom she dealt; and In fact, State Department lawyers this month told a Washington federal court they’re facing at least 30 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits from individuals and groups demanding agency records from Clinton’s tenure there, some of which predate the March revelation of Clinton’s private server. “This has been a huge distraction,” political strategist David Gergen, a onetime Clinton White House adviser, said in a phone interview. “The longer this goes on, the greater a distraction this turns out to be.” Clinton’s lead for the Democratic nomination is shrinking in some polls as Senator Bernie Sanders gains ground and Vice President Joe Biden edges closer to a decision about whether to run.

The newest set of emails are expected to be largely from late 2010 and early 2011, with State keeping to its prior practice of releasing emails from Clinton’s account in rough chronological order. Gergen, who also served under Republican presidents including Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon, said even if Clinton didn’t appreciate the political risk of opting to use a private account, others should have recognized the danger. “This was a massive failure at the staff level in not warning her off this. The Clinton email issue hanging over her presidential campaign has become less about the contents of the emails than about Clinton’s control over the server and her decision to delete about 30,000 emails that her lawyers determined were personal. “Well, it is like a drip, drip, drip,” Clinton said. “There’s only so much that I can control. While Clinton has kept her clearance, it’s common practice to suspend them while an investigation or internal inquiry is ongoing, according to some national security experts on Capitol Hill and in private practice. It’s cost her, and cost her in this campaign,” he said. “One of the big questions is, did she learn the wrong lessons from the Clinton presidency?” The Clinton campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment on the pursuit of records from State and her server, nor on the questions surrounding Abedin’s work and Clinton’s relationship to the foundation.

But whether that mishandling amounts to a violation of the law turns on one of those questions regarding what did she know and when did she know it that might never be completely resolved. But what I have tried to do in explaining this is to provide more transparency and more information than anybody that I’m aware of who’s ever served in the government,’’ she said.

Clinton also repeated her claim that she used the private account for convenience and rejected criticism that it was set up to make it harder for Republicans or the media to obtain information. “It’s totally ridiculous. So, when Clinton gets questions from reporters and voters about her emails, she’s also talking to investigators. “Republicans have been coming after you for years.

Berry, a Virginia lawyer who practices security clearance law, said top-ranking officials, regardless of political party, are often treated differently than low-level bureaucrats who may quickly see their clearances suspended or revoked. Remember, Clinton is talking to two audiences: voters and investigators, and when it comes to avoiding subpoenas, lawyers will tell you, there’s an important law passed in 2002 after the Enron scandal. Clinton has been under fire for months for exclusively using a personal email system routed through a private server at her Chappaqua, N.Y., house for all four years she served as secretary.

Of the more than 4,000 emails released in the last batch, about 125 of them contained information deemed classified after Clinton sent or received them. The FBI, a pair of inspectors general and Congress all are looking into the issue, prompting questions about her judgment and the motive for actions that potentially led to national security risks. She turned over her server to the FBI at its request and her attorney, David Kendall, gave investigators a thumb drive with more than 30,000 of her emails.

Others were filed by the Associated Press and, perhaps most significantly, by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold, who’s represented by an attorney who has worked for Occupy Wall Street protesters and a co-counsel who served in Clinton’s State Department and identifies as a Democrat. One issue that keeps coming up is whether that material was classified. “Whether it was a personal account or a government account, I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified which is the way you know whether something is,” she said. The issue has harmed the Democratic presidential front-runner’s standing in polls, where more and more voters say Clinton is not trustworthy, in part, because of the email controversy. Assuming State meets court-established targets, which the agency fell behind in July before recovering last month, the new release is expected to bring to more than 19,000 the total number of Clinton email pages made public. But that still leaves State’s project—being carried out month-by-month in response to a federal judge’s order in a FOIA case—only a little more than one-third complete.

It’s in a section of Title 18 that also penalizes publishing false weather reports. (It calls for 90 days in jail, in case you were wondering.) Nonetheless, it’s an important statute that protects the integrity of the records and data that keep the government functioning. The messages weren’t the original target of the reporter’s broad-based search, which the former State lawyer, Ryan James, said was intended to get a sense of the candidate’s policy priorities and objectives. In order to prosecute someone for mishandling classified information, the Justice Department needs to show a defendant knowingly violated the law — they knew the information was classified but went on to send it anyway. Security clearances are generally granted for five years at a time. “If this were a normal employee, it would be entirely routine to temporarily suspend their access pending investigation,” said Bradley Moss, a Washington lawyer who handles national security information.

Last week, State sent the House Benghazi Committee more than 900 emails relating to Libya that were not included in a batch of about 300 emails provided to the panel in February. Their dragnet document demand was written to seek every record, in anticipation of having to scale it down in negotiation with the government. “When the news broke about her using private e-mail, we said we wanted all the e-mail,” James said. “Obviously we didn’t know what would come up.” “I personally don’t want to see a Republican in the White House,” he said by phone. “The candidate did what the candidate did. But Paul Pillar, a former CIA official and deputy chief of the intelligence community’s counterterrorism center who serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he is not aware of any rule that mandates that once a case has been referred to an agency, such as the FBI, that a clearance must be suspended. However, while the nearly 300 Benghazi-related emails were the first ones State made public in May, the newly-delivered batch is not being prioritized for public release.

My objective is to do my legal duty for my client.” Government lawyers have asked the Washington court to appoint one judge to oversee document production in the FOIA cases now spread before more than a dozen judges. Clinton’s Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance was re-validated after she left office, according to the Sept. 22 letter to Grassley.

Some of that money comes from the Pittsburgh-based Scaife Foundations; he declined to say how much money flows from that source or identify any others. Intelligence agencies have said several other messsages in Clinton’s account contained classified information, including at least two messages classified “TOP SECRET” or higher. Until his death last year, those foundations were controlled by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who funded probes into alleged wrongdoing by Bill Clinton during his presidency. The department acknowledged for the first time in the same letter that it did not provide Kendall with a secure enough safe because officials did not expect the correspondence to be deemed so secret.

An executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2009 allows those who have occupied senior policy-making positions appointed or designated by the president or vice president to access classified information after they leave office. When the controversy over Clinton’s private email account erupted in March, she said she’d turned over about 55,000 pages of messages to State in December.

Two years ago, his group had $12.6 million in expenditures, spokesman Bryan Lanza said. “We’re just looking for answers,” Bossie said outside the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. courthouse in Washington after a Sept. 22 appearance where his organization convinced a judge to order the department to speed up its document processing. Blumenthal’s concerns that democracy might never take hold in Libya — even after holding elections and “fulfilling a list of proper democratic milestones.” Why would Mrs. Clinton was attempting to destroy evidence that she was expressly warned her Libyan adventure could result in a disaster and become a new haven for Islamic militants.

When asked how she determined which emails were “personal” — and therefore destroyed — and which emails were work-related, she said, “I made those decisions.” So the law was violated and Mrs.